Customer Centricity – The Lights Are On, but Nobody’s Home

Yet when customers point out that something is not working, far too little happens far too often. Nobody has the necessary authority. The budget sits in another department. The relevant functions have competing priorities, and nobody feels genuinely accountable for the overall customer experience. The lights are on – but in reality, nobody’s home.

That is the uncomfortable conclusion to be drawn from Medallia’s 2026 State of Customer Experience Report. The report does not describe a market lacking data, technology or good intentions. It describes organisations that lack the ability to translate customer insight into concrete decisions and operational change. The challenge is therefore not primarily a CX problem. It is a leadership problem.

Companies Believe They Are Improving – Customers Just Haven’t Noticed

According to Medallia, 66 per cent of CX practitioners believe their company’s customer experiences improved during the past year. Only 17 per cent of consumers agree. When so few customers can feel the improvements the organisation believes it has delivered, the executive team should not be discussing the wording of the next NPS survey. It should be asking whether its management information reflects the customer’s reality at all.

Perhaps the company is measuring activity rather than impact. Perhaps it is celebrating the implementation of a new platform even though customers’ problems remain. Or perhaps individual departments are reporting improvements at isolated touchpoints while the end-to-end customer journey remains fragmented. The gap between internal confidence and the customer’s experience is therefore not merely a matter of differing perceptions. It may be evidence of a fundamental measurement failure.

When management cannot distinguish between a completed activity and an improved customer experience, reporting becomes a comfort blanket rather than a management tool.

The Problem Is Not a Lack of Customer Insight

Companies have never had access to more customer data. They collect survey responses, transactional data, complaints, reviews, customer enquiries, conversation logs and digital behavioural signals. Yet Medallia’s report shows that 30–40 per cent of the departments receiving CX recommendations do not act on them.

This tells us that the bottleneck is not the ability to listen. The bottleneck is the ability to change the business.

Many organisations still treat customer centricity as a listening system. The CX team collects customer feedback, analyses it and presents the findings in a dashboard. The team must then try to persuade Sales, Marketing, Product, IT, Operations, Finance and Customer Service to prioritise the solutions.

It is an unreasonable setup. The CX function is held accountable for outcomes it has neither the decision-making authority, budget nor operational ownership to deliver. It is expected to influence the most important customer outcomes without owning the decisions that create them.

Customer Centricity Without Authority Is Organised Wishful Thinking

Medallia’s figures make the structural problem clear. Fifty-eight per cent of CX practitioners say their initiatives require funding from budgets the CX function does not control. At the same time, 43 per cent say there is no single senior decision-maker responsible for CX priorities and budget.

This is not a minor organisational barrier. It is the problem itself.

When funding depends on functions with different objectives, customer initiatives often lose out to projects that are more visible and deliver more immediate results. Marketing protects its campaign budget. IT prioritises stability and security. Operations focuses on productivity, Finance on costs, and Sales on next quarter’s revenue. Everyone can make rational decisions within their own area of responsibility without anyone optimising the overall customer relationship.

McKinsey has highlighted the same challenge: customer experience cuts across the organisation, while budgets, incentives and decision rights remain divided by function. Customer centricity must therefore be embedded in the company’s operating model through clear roles, shared objectives, genuine decision rights and accountability at executive level.

Customer centricity cannot be delegated to a department. It must be part of the way the company is managed.

You Do Not Just Have an ROI Problem – You Have a Design Problem

The demand to document the financial impact of CX is growing, and rightly so. But many organisations launch customer initiatives without first defining the underlying economic mechanism. Is the initiative supposed to increase retention, improve conversion, reduce the number of enquiries, minimise errors or encourage customers to buy more frequently – or spend more?

When nobody can answer that question, the company does not primarily have a measurement problem. It has designed an initiative without a clear business model.

Both Forrester and McKinsey emphasise the need to link CX initiatives to tangible value drivers such as retention, revenue, operating costs, cash flow and earnings. The economic logic must therefore be built in from the beginning – not added later when the CFO asks what the company has received in return for its investment.

AI Does Not Make a Paralysed Organisation Decisive

AI can analyse large volumes of data, identify patterns and resolve simple customer enquiries quickly. But the technology does not solve unclear decision rights, internal conflicts or a lack of accountability. An intelligent dashboard is still just a dashboard if nobody can act on it.

At the same time, customers’ acceptance of AI depends on the situation. Automation works best when the task is simple, the risk is limited and the solution is unambiguous. When the customer’s finances, security, health or frustration are at stake, the need for human judgement increases. The relevant strategic discussion is therefore not how quickly the company can automate customer interactions, but where AI reduces customer effort – and where it increases uncertainty and perceived risk.

The Question the Executive Team Should Ask Itself

The crucial question is not whether the company has a CX programme or enough customer data. It is:

Who can actually decide upon and fund the changes highlighted by customer insight?

If the answer is unclear, the company’s customer centricity is unclear as well. A serious customer-centric management model requires a named executive sponsor, clear ownership of the most important customer journeys, cross-functional decision-making authority, sufficient budgets and shared KPIs connecting customer experience with behaviour and financial performance.

Without this, customer centricity easily becomes corporate theatre. Workshops are held, dashboards are presented, customer journeys are mapped and AI is discussed, while known customer problems continue.

Companies do not need more signals from customers. Customers have already explained where the problems are. What is missing is a management model that translates insight into priorities, investment and operational change.

Ultimately, customer centricity is about how the company allocates power, money and accountability. Only when customer insight can change decisions is the company genuinely customer-centric.

Everything else is just light in the windows.